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Texas School Finance Hearing in Austin Goes After Questions of Priorities and Equity

Posted byHoumanitarian

(Gary Scharrer, Houston Chronicle)
AUSTIN – Lawyers representing hundreds of school districts challenging the state’s school funding system argued Monday that it’s “hopelessly broken,” but an attorney for the state said the situation isn’t as dire as the districts portray.

More than 600 school districts are suing the state, alleging that Texas lawmakers are not providing enough money or equitable funding for 5 million children attending public schools.

“It is hopelessly broken,” Richard Gray, one of the schools’ lawyers, said of the state’s school funding system. “It is not only inadequate, it is irrational, it’s unfair and most importantly, it’s unconstitutional.”

Assistant Attorney General Shelley Dahlberg disagreed. “We might have an impending crisis today, but it is not a crisis,” Dahlberg told state District Judge John Dietz.

The Texas Supreme Court rejected school district claims of inadequate funding with a 2005 ruling that the existing system was an impending crisis, but not a present crisis. Dietz referred to that ruling multiple times at the start of the trial that is expected to run through mid-January.

The case is likely to end up back before the Texas Supreme Court, which found in the 2005 decision that the public education system cannot make continued improvement without “increased funding, improved efficiencies or better methods of education.”

Dietz said, “Here we are eight years later and it appears to me that there is an invitation by the Supreme Court to examine, if in this interim, have there been improved efficiencies, increased funding or better methods of education.”
(Read the rest of this story at the Houston Chronicle)

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